A few days ago, Apple (much to our surprise!) agreed to letting a competitor browser within the App Store.

Opera Mini is a version of the popular Opera browser, which is available for Mac OS and for the PC.  Sources suggest that the Opera Mini achieves a much faster page load on the iPhone in comparison to Mobile Safari due to the way it caches and converts pages.  Opera Mini also uses a cluster of powerful services in a data centre to compress content originally designed for desktop browsers, in order to make the pages load faster on a mobile internet connection.